The Fisher King

I used to do improv with this guy Dan, who used to sing "How About You?"  He sang a lot of showtunes, actually, because he was a musical theatre major.  Took me a while to make the connection to The Fisher King, though.  Dan's a fan of this film, methinks. I know I am.

The Fisher King might be Terry Gilliam's best film, in that, by far, this is his most coherent effort with the most compelling story.

Your usual Gilliam touches are here — he loves twisty plots and off-kilter camera techniques and medieval symbols and filthy locations and downtrodden, misfit people.  He also goes for the gut punch with characters who are so deeply flawed you wonder how they live with themselves, and then he makes them worse.

Gilliam's films are usually style-over-substance affairs, but not The Fisher King.  In this one, the narrative is as strong, if not stronger, than Gilliam's typical vision.

Jeff Bridges plays Jack Lucas, a shock jock on a New York radio station.  We see him hanging up on people, telling people off, and at one point, he tells a caller that all of the yuppies "need to be stopped."  The caller turns somber, ominously, and that's the end of the call.

Lucas' career is on the upswing.  He's going to read for a part in a terrible television show — one of those sitcoms with a catchphrase — and he has to rehearse the line, "Forgive me," until he is convinced that he has the line delivery down cold.  Then he turns on the news to find that the somber caller went crazy, took Lucas seriously, and shot up a restaurant, killing seven people.

Flash forward to three years later.  Lucas now works in a video store with his girlfriend, played by Mercedes Ruehl, who pretty much disappeared from any screen I've seen in 15 years.  The sitcom with the stupid catchphrase is now a milquetoast hit with American audiences, and Harry Shearer, not Lucas, got the part.  People on the street say "Forgive me!" to Lucas as he walks by.

At his lowest point, Jack is ready to kill himself when two thugs show up to try to set him on fire in one of those senseless set-a-bum-on-fire type killings.  But then Perry, played by Robin Williams, shows up out of nowhere to save him.

Perry gives Jack a place to recuperate, which is in Perry's makeshift home in a boiler room.  Before Jack can leave, Perry tells Jack that he knows where the Holy Grail is located.  Some rich man has the grail, Perry says, and he needs help stealing it.

Confused and alarmed, Jack gets out of there, but not before the owner of the building stops him on the way out and tells Jack all about Perry's story.

Perry was in the restaurant, with his wife, who was killed.

Perry spent a year in a mental institution after the shooting.  He was a professor.  Now he's a homeless man with a fixation on medieval lore, and he hallucinates.  He's a pathetic figure.  He's by turns enchanted by an awkward female office worker, and tormented by a demonic, red knight.

Helping him isn't as simple as throwing money at him, Jack finds, and that kind of sensitivity to the plight of the less fortunate is never preachy here — just obvious if you're not an idiot.  Williams and Bridges are in top form here (both would have to wait a while for Academy recognition).

Add The Fisher King to the miles-long list of films I wish I'd written — the kind of piece that combines all these fantastic set pieces with character arcs and real heart.  No shocker here — Richard LaGravenese's screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.

I saw this film for the first time when I was 20, living in my first college apartment and checking out movies from the library as often as I could.  This is one of the earliest examples of me watching a film and being aware of the quality of writing on display — not just clever jokes or quotable lines of dialogue, but a fantastic story.  You might say this is one of the first films that made me want to write screenplays.

That's what keeps me coming back to this one.